This invention relates to authentication protocols and more particularly to protocols for insuring validity of communicating radio-telephones and the like.
In conventional telephony each telephone set (fax unit, modem, etc) is physically connected to a unique port on a switch at a local central office. The connection is through a dedicated wire, or through a designated channel on a dedicated wire. The wire connection is installed by the service provider (who, typically, is the common carrier) and, therefore, the service provider can be reasonably sure that transmission on the channel arrives from the subscriber. By comparison, authentication of a subscriber in wireless telephony is less certain.
Under the current cellular telephony arrangement in the United States, when a cellular telephone subscriber places a call, his or her cellular telephone indicates to the service provider the identity of the caller for billing purposes. This information is not encrypted. If an interloper eavesdrops at the right time, he or she can obtain the subscriber's identification information. This includes the subscriber's phone number and the electronic serial number (ESN) of the subscriber's equipment. Thereafter, the interloper can program his or her cellular telephone to impersonate that bona fide subscriber to fraudulently obtain services. Alternately, an interloper can inject himself into an established connection, overpower the customer's cellular telephone equipment by transmitting more power, and redirect the call to his or her purposes by sending certain control codes to the service provider. Basically, such piracy will succeed because the service provider has no mechanism for independently authenticating the identity of the caller at the time the connection is established and/or while the connection is active.
Technology is available to permit an eavesdropper to automatically scan all of the cellular frequencies in a given cell for such identification information. Consequently, piracy of cellular telephone services is rampant. Also, the lack of enciphering of the speech signals lays bare to eavesdroppers the content of conversations. In short, there is a clear and present need for effective security measures in the cellular telephony art, and that suggests the use of cryptology for the purposes of ensuring authentication and privacy.
Several standard cryptographic methods exist for solving the general sort of authentication problem that exists in cellular telephony, but each turns out to have practical problems. First, a classical challenge/response protocol may be used, based on a private key cryptographic algorithm. In this approach, a subscriber's mobile station is issued with a secret key which also known by the home system. When a serving system wishes to authenticate a subscriber, it applies to the home system for a challenge and a response to use with the given subscriber. The home system composes a random challenge and applies a one-way function to the challenge concatenated with the subscribers key to obtain the corresponding response. The challenge and response are supplied to the serving system, which issues the challenge to the mobile station. The mobile station in turn replies with the response, which it calculates from the challenge and from its stored secret key. The serving system compares the responses supplied by the home system and by the mobile station, and if they match, the mobile station is deemed authentic.
The problem with this approach is that often the serving system is unable to contact the home system quickly enough to allow authentication of a call setup, or that the database software on the home system is unable to look up the subscriber's secret key and compose the challenge/response pair quickly enough. Network or software delays of a second or two would add that much dead time till the subscriber hears a dial tone after picking up the handset when placing a call, and longer delays (given the control networks and switching apparatus currently used by cellular providers) would be common. In the present milieu, such delays are unacceptable.
Public key cryptography provides another standard class of ways for solving authentication problems. Generally speaking, each mobile station would be provided with a "public key certificate" of identity, signed by the public key of the service provider, stating that the mobile station is a legitimate customer of the service provider. In addition, each mobile would also be given secret data (private keys) which it can use, together with the certificate, to prove to third parties (such as the serving system) that it is a legitimate customer.
For example, service provider could have a pair of RSA keys, (F,G), with F private and G public. The service provider could supply each mobile with its own pair (D,E) of RSA keys, together with F(E) (the encryption of the mobile's public key E using the provider's private key F). Then a mobile asserts its identity by sending (E,F(E)) to the serving system. The serving system applies G to F(E) to obtain E. The serving system generates a challenge X, encrypts it with the mobile's public key E to obtain E(X) which it sends to the mobile. The mobile applies its private key D to E(X) to obtain X, which it sends back to the server in the clear as a response.
Although some variations on this theme involve less computation or data transmission than others, no public key authentication scheme yet exists which is efficiently executable in less than a second's time on the sort of hardware currently used in cellular telephones. Even though network connectivity between the serving and home systems is not needed at the moment of authentication, as it is in the classical approach, the same time constraints which rule out the classical approach also rule out the public key approach.
Another technique is proposed by R. M. Needham and M. D. Schroeder in Using Encryption for Authentication in Large Computer Networks, Comm. of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 12, 993-999 (December, 1978). In brief, the Needham-Schroeder technique requires that a third, trusted, party (AS) should serve as an authentication server which distributes session keys to the prospective parties (A and B) who are attempting to establish secure communications. The protocol is as follows: when party A wishes to communicate with party B, it sends to authentication server AS his own name, the name of party B and a transaction identifier. Server AS returns the name of party B, a session key, the transaction identifier and a message encrypted with B's key. All that information is encrypted with A's key. Party A receives the information, decrypts it, selects the portion that is encrypted with B's key and forwards that portion to party B. Party B decrypts the received messages and finds in it the name of party A and the session key. A last check (to prevent "replays") is made by party B issuing a challenge to party A and party A replies, using the session key. A match found at party B authenticates the identity of party A.